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ENGLAND AND AMERICA .^'^ 



A 

DISCOURSE 



DELIVEKED BY 



W. H. FUKNESS 



MINISTER OF THE 



FIRST CONGREGATIONAL UNITARIAN CHURCH 
SUNDAY DECBMBEE 22 1861 



C. Sherman & Son, 



Printers, Philads. 



[not published.] 






Waat. Bea. Si&t. Soe. 



DISCOURSE. 



JAMES III. 11. 



" DOTH A FOUNTAIN SEND FORTH AT THE SAME PLACE SWEET WATER 



AND BITTER 



?" 



In the great voyage upon -which we and all that avc hold 
dear are embarked we have suddenly drifted on to a storm- 
tossed sea, where the billows rage and battle with one another, 
a perfect maelstrom ; for here and now two deep, strong cur- 
rents, running in opposite directions, have met, and the foun- 
dations of the Avorld are trembling with the violence of the 
concussion. The one current clear and sweet with the im- 
perishable and life-giving element of Freedom, the other thick 
and bitter with the foul corruption of human Bondage, — both 
sent forth from the same spring. Two hundred and forty-one 
years ago this day, the first company of Christian freemen 
landed at the North. Two hundred and forty-one years ago 
this very year, the first company of Slaves was brought to the 
Virginian shore, and the blessing and the curse came from the 
same source. England is the fountain of Northern Freedom 
and of Southern Slavery. England is the spring that has sent 
forth sweet water and bitter. 

This December day is, indeed, a most memorable anniver- 
sary. We may well pause and ponder the events which it 
recalls, insignificant as they were at the time of their occur- 
rence, but momentous in the consequences Avhich are now 
flowing from them with such fearful activity as we witness, 
involving revolutions, broad and deep, in human affairs, the 
extent of which no human wisdom can foresee. We naturally 
turn to the events which the day calls to mind and revert to 
their origin. 

England, I repeat, bestowed these two gifts, Liberty and 
Slavery, on this new world. Liberty she gave reluctantly. 



The men who brought it hither were driven by persecution 
from her shores. And that they were enabled to preserve the 
sacred gift amidst the horrors of the wilderness was owinc. to 
no fostering help of hers. She cared not if they perished. 
Not until they began .to grow in numbers and in streno-th did 
she take any notice of them, and then she extended hm- arm 
to them only to make them feel its oppressive weight, and to 
crush the liberty which her outcast children had brought to 
these shores. 

But that other and fatal gift of African bondage she fas- 
tened on this Northern continent with a willing hand, in oppo- 
sition to the wishes, the conscience, and the humanity of these 
then infant colonies. In the original draft of the Declaration 
of our National Independence, it was formally stated, as you 
know, as one of the causes justifying that Declaration, that the 
British King had insisted upon establishing this accursed inte- 
rest on this soil ; accursed indeed, because, while it brought 
material wealth, its inevitable effect was from the very first to 
corrupt the hearts of the people by so inflaming the lust of 
gain and of power as to deprave their natural sense of justice 
and humanity. 

Such is briefly the record of the past in regard to the re- 
lation to this country of British power acting through its civil 
organization. And now, after two centuries and a half, Eng- 
land is again, to all appearances, preparing to assume the 
position of protecting the bondage of the African in this land. 
Plmgmg behind her the great pledges she gave of her obliga- 
tions to the Cause of Human Freedom by the Abolition of the 
Slave trade more than fifty years ago, and by the Emancipation 
of her West Indian colonies thirty years ago, she is commit- 
ting herself to an alliance with the flagrant rebellion against 
God and man, which threatens, not only the existence of this 
nation, but Human Rights everywhere. Already her influ- 
ence has wrought to infuse into this atrocious treason against 
mankind the strength which alone has enabled it to live to 
this hour. Long before this the slaveholders' revolt would 



have come to a miserable end had it not been animated by 
the hope that with the rich bribe of Southern cotton it 
■wouhl soon be able to purchase the powerful help of English 
recognition. This was one of the two grounds of reliance 
upon which the Southern leaders dared to commit the overt 
act of treason. Who believes that they would have ventured 
to perpetrate the outrage save in the confident expectation of 
Northern sympathy and foreign recognition, the recognition 
of England most especially ? The hope of the first, of the 
sympathy of a Northern party, was blown to atoms by the 
first gun discharged against Fort Sumter. And the hope of the 
other, the recognition of England, would have been shivered 
in like manner if England, true to her grand position as the 
Abolisher of the Slave trade and the Emancipator of Slaves, 
had held herself grossly insulted by so much as the faintest 
hint of a proposition to recognize as a sister nation a commu- 
nity formally planting itself upon the lawfulness of buying 
and selling human beings. She should have scorned the idea, 
as she would the proposal to reinstate the Algerines or to ac- 
knowledge the independence of any colony of buccaneers. 
This, and nothing less than this, she owed instantly to her 
own fame. Let it be that she had no love for us of the North, 
that republican institutions looked weak and vulgar in her 
eyes, and that the spectacle of our Northern prosperity had 
made no impression upon her ; let it be that she was utterly 
insensible to the enthusiastic hospitality with which the whole 
people of the Free States had just received her young Prince, 
still she owed it to herself, to every event in her great history 
which has attested her love of liberty, and which has given 
her so commanding a position in the aftairs of mankind, — she 
owed it to God and man to repel with instant and crushing 
contempt the insulting suspicion that she could give counte- 
nance to a movement which, under the thinly woven pretexts, 
which any child could see through, of an alleged riglit of 
Secession and of the Sovereignty of States, undertakes to re- 
verse the Eternal Law of natural Right and to make human 



6 



beings, not what God Almighty made them to be, but chattels 
and brutes. Had she done so at the very first, had she given 
the world to understand at the very first symptom of this out- 
break that for no material consideration could the Southern 
attempt to nationalize human bondage receive from her any- 
thing but her most emphatic condemnation, that attempt 
would have been overwhelmed with speedy and signal failure. 

Indeed, if, immediately upon the emancipation of her West 
Indian colonies, England had made it the condition of the 
continuance of her friendly relations with these United States 
that we should follow her example and in like manner eman- 
cipate our bondsmen, it would only have been in accordance 
with the noble stand she had taken as the champion of Human 
Rights. But this, I suppose, was too much to be expected. 
The least, however, she could do, standing where she stood, 
was to see to it that no new efi"ort was made to perpetuate the 
bondage of the African. Identified as she was with the Cause 
of the Slave, she should have frowned down at once the idea of 
receiving into the sisterhood of Christian nations a community 
deliberately basing itself on the violated rights of man. And 
had she done this the attempt, I repeat, would have been 
crushed in the bud. 

But this England did not do. On the contrary, at the 
breaking out of the Southern Rebellion, wholly untouched by 
the fact of twenty millions of people rising up as one man 
against the outrage, England at once began to contemplate the 
idea of giving the hand of national fellowship) to the slavehold- 
ing confederation as something more than a possibility, and 
forthwith placed herself in the posture of waiting and watch- 
ing for an opportunity to put the idea into execution. And 
she has availed herself of the shortcomings of the North to ex- 
cuse herself for her own dereliction from the duty which she 
owed, not to us, but to herself and to mankind. Because this 
Government, instead of closing the Southern ports, blockaded 
them, and thus virtually conceded to the Southern conspirators 
a belligerent character, England pleaded that^she only followed 



our example in regarding tliem in the same light. And because 
the Free States have not even yet ventured fully and squarely 
to assume the Anti-slavery position, to which the South has 
driven them in the great struggle, England and Englishmen ask, 
with an air of the greatest innocence, " How can you of the 
North expect us to sympathize with you ? You are not, you say 
yourselves, contending against slavery." Whatever we of the 
North are contending for or against, however imperfectly we 
may state our side of the case, there cannot he the shadow 
of a doubt as to what the one purpose of the Slave States is. 
That purpose is just as plain as it is barbarian. Although the 
L English people know nothing else about our part of the world, 

^ they cannot be ignorant of that. And if they cannot sympa- 

thize with our Northern policy or no-policy, much less can 
they sympathize with the aim of the South, that is if they 
have a"ny true sympathy to bestow or to withhold. Although 
they have no love to give us, they can have nothing but ab- 
horrence for the unholy enterprise of the Southern slavemas- 
ters if their hatred of Slavery be as strong as they protess, 
and'as their whole history justifies us in supposing it to be. 

But instead of manifesting any opposition to the Southern 
movement, instead of evincing the slightest repugnance to it, 
England takes without a blush the ground of neutrality; a 
ground which, in a contest like the present, is an absolute im- 
possibility. Neutrality between Freedom and Bondage! That 
L in plain words, England, that she may get the cotton that 
she has learned how to turn into bread, claims to be neither 
for God nor for the Devil. Oh, friends, it is no more possible 
for nations, though they have ruled the seas for a thousand 
« years and girdled the globe with the ensigns of their power,---i 

i i no more possible for them than it is for individual men to take 

neutral gro'und between freedom such as ours, and te inhuman 
bondage for which the South contends; between the Etena 
:: of^Natural Justice and the violation of that law wi ou 
incurring the guilt of complicity with the violator. A\boso 
not for the Ilight,..^hich is now so ruthlessly assailed, is against 



it. And England may profess and protest as much as she 
chooses, her influence is working, and will continue to work 
as it has already worked, to strengthen the bloodstained 
hands which are striving to rend in pieces the God-written 
charter of Human Rights. In form, she may stand aloof; in 
fact, she is making herself an accomplice in the crime. 
Blinded by her commercial interests, she has taken a false 
and most perilous step, perilous to her own character ; a step 
which it will be no easy thing for her to retrace, because as it 
is with individuals, so is it with nations : when once they 
commit themselves to a position, their pride instantly blind- 
folds them to their error, binds them to it as with chains of 
iron, and then goes before them and drags them to their fall. 

That we should see things as they are is the imperative 
necessity of the hour, and therefore, for the sake of the truth, 
to which, now when everything else threatens to fail us, we 
can alone look for guidance, the position of that nation, our 
amicable relations with which are in peril of being interrupted, 
must be seen and understood. We must not be misled. We 
must not be blind. We must see things as they are. 

In what I am saying, I have not the shadow of a desire to 
stir up any animosity against our mother country. I have never 
yet heard of any other people from whom I could wish in pre- 
ference that we had been descended. I have and can have no 
national prejudice to gratify. I share in common with mil- 
lions of the people of the North in the sentiment of venera- 
tion for England, which we drew in with our mothers' milk, 
and which one lineage, and one language, and one priceless 
literature have tended to strengthen with our growth. 

Neither have I the slightest disposition, in view of the pre- 
sent state of our relations with England, to act the part of an 
alarmist. I do not believe that the great majority of the 
people of this country have any desire but to remain at peace 
vfith. every other nation. I do not believe that one particle 
of disrespect towards the flag of England had share in the act 
which has just kindled the Old Country into a flame ; and 



tterefore, I do not believe that anything that has yet occurred 
will be accounted or appealed to as a justifying cause of war. 
But I cannot help seeing that England has taken a false posi- 
tion, false to her own honor, a position nominally neutral, but 
in fact and from the necessity of things, committing her to an 
alliance with a rebellion against the Rights of Humanity. She 
has placed herself, however vehemently she may disclaim it, 
in an attitude hostile to the North. It forces her at this mo- 
ment to be the protector of rebels and slaveholders. Had she 
taken the high ground upon which it was due to her own 
history that she should stand, no rebel commissioners would 
have dared to set foot upon a deck of hers ; or when they had, 
and had been taken as they have been, she would have shared 
our satisfaction in the seizure of traitors to God and man, and 
made a special acknowledgment to our Government for the 
rescue of her flag from dishonor. Thus false, I say, is her 
position, that she is forced, whether with her will or against it, 
to take sides with this great treason. Although nothing that 
has as yet occurred may be considered to justify war, so long 
as England stands where she is, there is perpetual danger that 
we shall.be brought into bloody collision with her. 

Notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, up to the 
present hour there has existed far and wide throughout these 
Free States, a love of England, strong and deep, second only 
to the love we bear our country. How could it be otherwise ? 
England is the native soil, the birthplace of this American 
nation. Thence, as from its original fountain, we drew our 
national life. Our intellectual being has been built up out of 
the strong and costly material of English thought. The soil 
of that country is our classic ground. 

Nothing more decisively reveals the deep interest we have 
in England than our extreme sensitiveness to English opi- 
nions of us. Men care little for judgments passed upon them 
by those whom they neither respect nor love, to whom they 
are wholly indifferent. What travellers from other countries, 



f 



10 



France or Germany, coming among us, say or write about us, 
receives little of our regard, however wise and just it may be. 
But the remarks of English travellers instantly attract our 
attention, and an importance is attached to them out of all 
proportion to their worth. It is true we have become a little 
hardened against English criticism, as it was very desirable 
we should be. The time has been when it seemed as if the 
American character were losing all pretensions to any dignity 
or self-respect, so sensitive were we to what Englishmen and 
Englishwomen said of us, and into such unmanly exhibitions 
of chagrin and indignation were we driven by any w^ord of 
slight or ridicule from English lips. It seemed at one time as 
if we depended for our very existence upon what was thought 
of us in that quarter. I do not think that in all history can 
be found any parallel to the strong affection of the people of 
this free North for England. It is native to us. Two wars 
and occasional misunderstandings, such as will sometimes occur 
among the nearest of kin, have not been able to extinguish it. 
And of late years we have been insensibly growing in the 
belief that the affection Ave have so long and so fervently 
cherished for the old country was reciprocated ; that, as we 
had so long looked with admiring eyes upon England, England 
was beginning to regard this country with a new and kind- 
ly interest. We flattered ourselves that our rapid growth 
and unexampled prosperity, and the many and valuable con- 
tributions which this country has made to the arts of life were 
beginning to tell in our favor, and win for us her cordial re- 
spect, and that she Avas really learning to regard us with some- 
thing of the affection which we cherished for her ; that she 
was finding out that life in this quarter of the world Avas not 
altogether mean and vulgar. And Avhen she sent her young 
Prince to visit us, Ave took it as a signal token of her respect. 
With what heartiness he Avas received you all freshly remem- 
ber. So far as his reception by our people Avas concerned, 
there was nothing, until he entered a sla\'e State, to remind 
him that he had passed the boundaries of the dominions of 



11 

his mother. Indeed, so hearty was that reception, that some 
of us were so romantic as to expect that the Prince and his 
attendants would carry back such a report of the goodwill to- 
wards England, so cordially expressed by these Nortliern 
States, that a marked advance would instantly be made by 
the people of the old country in their regard for us, and that 
we should soon thereafter find that they were at least improvincr 
in their geographical knowledge, and were finding out where 
Washington stands, and New York and Boston. But it seems 
now that the Prince and his attendant noblemen took all our 
attentions as the due of their rank, and never interpreted them 
as the signs, which they simply were, of our veneration, not 
for their tinsel stars and ribbons, but for the great Enirlish 
nation, whose representatives these persons were. In fact 
some of the leading political writers of England sneeringly 
attributed the enthusiasm with which the Prince was welcomed 
here, not to any regard for England, but to an American fond- 
ness for shows. 

Not only the slight impression Avhich the warmth of that 
welcome made upon the English mind, but much that has 
occurred since : the interpretation of our legislation, as if it 
were intended to put an afi"ront upon her, and as if England, 
m all her laws of trade, had always been studiously careful of 
the interests of other nations; and particularly her bearino- 
towards us since the breaking out of our present great trouble, 
forces upon us the mortifying conviction that England does not 
love us, that she has never dreamed of reciprocating our fer- 
vent regards. While our evident and rapidly growing power 
has awed her into bating her breath in the expression' of her 
contempt, she has not been able to conceal not only that she 
has not loved us, but that she regards us with secret dislike. 
She has not been able to hide her desire that this Republic 
should be broken up. 

We need not have waited for a state of things like the pre- 
sent, to disclose to us the feelings with which the English 
people have looked upon us. We might very safely have in- 



12 

ferred their dislike of us from the ignorance in which they have 
persisted in wrapping themselves up in regard not only to our 
political institutions, but even to the most obvious facts of our 
geography. When we have committed any offence against 
good manners, and betrayed any vulgarity, they have been 
quick to note and to publish it, but English eyes have been stu- 
diously averted from the map of the United States. They 
have been too much annoyed by its size to bear to examine its 
details, or to take note of those features of it which, with our 
institutions, and our blood, make it the map of One Nation, 
One and Indivisible. The English are pre-eminently an en- 
lightened people. They ransack every department of human 
knowledge. What is there that escapes them ? Their gross 
ignorance of this country, then, can be accounted for only 
u'pon the supposition that it is a subject for which they have 
no fondness but a positive aversion. 

And when we pause over this English dislike of us, the 
reason of it soon becomes apparent. Although it^ may be 
creditahle to our good nature, it is mortifying to our 'sagacity 
that we should ever have overlooked it. How could it pos- 
sibly have been otherwise, than that England should regard 
us as she has done ? The existence of a populous and pros- 
perous Republic,— of a great successful country, without a 
throne, without a nobility, without an established church,— 
how could we ever have been so foolish as to imagine that such 
a spectacle could be pleasing in the eyes of those, in whose 
very blood it is to believe that without kings, lords, and 
bishops, any decent civilization is impossible ? 

My friends, the prosperity, the existence of this country, with 
its free, democratic institutions, is a standing menace to every 
form of monarchical government in Christendom, and it fur- 
nishes all living under such forms, who feel their oppressive 
power with an impregnable ground of opposition. Why, if it 
were not for the horrible bondage which we have cherished within 
our borders, the like of which for barbarity exists in no other 
Christian country even the most despotic, and which has palsied 



13 

our influence, we sliould long since have revolutionized every na- 
tion m Europe ; and this not by any active interference in their 
affairs, but by the bare fact of our existence. What oppres- 
sive mode of government could have stood before the fact 
of millions of human beings, living here in such freedom and 
unprecedented activity and rare harmony as our social insti- 
tutions foster? Is it any wonder that England does not like 
us? How thoughtless in us to imagine that she should; or 
that the prospect of our overthrow could fail to give her 
satisfaction ! Of all the nations of the earth, she is most 
susceptible of our influence, because we both have one language 
and are of one blood. It is impossible that she should regard 
us with the cordiality which she would be sure to feel for us, 
were we upholding a form of society like her own. The more 
we have loved and revered England, thus showing that neither 
wars nor differences of any sort have been able to extinguish 
our goodwill towards her, and in this respect proving that our 
liberal institutions do not encourage the growth of national 
prejudices, the more difficult has it been for her to return our 
friendship. 

I have dwelt thus somewhat at length upon the relations in 
which we stand to our mother country, because the perils and 
portents of the hour render them deeply interesting. It is 
well to know our friends. We are threatened with war by 
England. It would be a great calamity. And although, as I 
have already remarked, I do not believe that the special cir- 
cumstances that occasion the threat, are sufficient to justify its 
execution, it is needful that we should understand the temper 
of that country towards us. England occupies, as we have seen, 
a false position towards these Free Northern States. And 
m relation to us, as we have also seen, she has no goodwill to 
spare. That she has, with all her mighty armament, a grow- 
ing aversion to war we may believe. If such a long and ter- 
rible experience of bereavement and debt as she has had in 
the bloody art has been lost upon her, we may well despair of 
the education of nations. At least that England will not pre- 
cipitate a war, we may reasonably trust. But we are not per- 



; 



^ 



14 



mitted to put any reliance upon her kindly feeling towards 
us It will become our Government to use the utmost caution, 
because we can count upon no goodwill of hers to put the best 
construction upon any indiscreet word. Having no love for 
us England will be slow to believe that we can have any con- 
sideration for her. Already the English Press is talking as if 
we had an intention of picking a quarrel with her I as if, what- 
ever might be our intentions at other times, we could entertain 
such unutterable folly now, or have any but the most anxious 
desire, at this most painful juncture, to maintain friendly rela- 
tions with all foreign governments. Such being the spirit of 
the English people, although the present cloud may pass, God 
only knows how soon another and darker cloud may arise, es- 
pecially in such a stormy time, and so long as England main- 
tains her present ground, which, however strenuously she may 
affirm to be a ground of peace, commits her to the side of the 

Rebellion. 

It must also be fully seen by us that the fierce and terrible 
conflict that has arisen on this soil concerns not so much any 
local and temporary interests of ours as those sacred principles 
of Justice and Liberty, which, in the eternal nature of things, 
most deeply concern all nations, every human being. Our 
Maker has so fashioned us, that nothing takes so mighty a 
hold upon us as Justice and Freedom. They meet the deepest 
and most essential want of our nature. These it is that 
alone give attraction to human history, value to human life. 
And since the world began, never has there been a conflict in 
which the purest Right and the blackest Wrong have been so 
directly opposed to one another, with scarcely any side issues 
to complicate the , bloody controversy, as in this struggle m 
which we are now engaged. It must needs be that it will, as 
it proceeds, command the attention of mankind as no other 
^var has ever done. It cannot be otherwise than that men 
will hold their breath as they look on and see the powers of 
darkness and of light in deadly conflict. That other nations 
should altogether stand aloof seems hardly possible. We have 
the deepest interest in the strife, but it is profoundly interesting 



15 



to the whole race of man. The well-being of the world is at 
stake, and it is not impossible that the world may plunge 
into the strife. It must be borne in mind too, that the im- 
pression has gone abroad among the ignorant foreign masses, 
that the Republic, never so strong in manhood, never so worthy 
of honor as at this hour, is tottering to its fall. Every foul 
bird of prey then will be whetting the beak. Where the 
carcass is supposed to be, there the vultures will be gathered 
together. 

And, therefore, the responsibility that is laid upon us, who 
are summoned to do battle for God and human Liberty, is un- 
speakably solemn ; and we must see to it, that we do not be- 
little and dishonor the great Cause in the eyes of the world by 
any short-sighted policy, by any time-serving expediency. It is 
no time to postpone and evade. We must confront the sacred 
issues and rise, every soul of us, to the height of the great argu- 
ment. Especially, before it will be too late, we must, as we 
can, make England see the false position she has, taken, and 
retreat from it. Sore as may be her need of the Southern 
staple, and blind as she now seems to be to everything but 
that, and savagely as from recent accounts her old thirst of 
conquest and of. power is beginning to stir her proud people, 
she cannot yet be prepared to assume deliberately and in 
form, the Protectorate of African bondage. We may at least 
hope that she will range herself, where alone she properly 
belongs, on the side of human freedom, when the great North, 
standing erect now in its strength, shall, with a bold hand, 
fling out into the heavens the glorious banner of Universal 
Emancipation. In the meanwhile, let no man of us be blind to 
the solemnity of the time. It calls for all our thoughtfulness 
and all our manhood. "We need the inspiration of faith, — 
faith in God and in man ; we need faith in the prayer that, 
beyond the power of words, should kindle an undying flame in 
our hearts. May God prepare this offering now, the spirit of 
self-sacrifice, of holiness, and of humanity, upon the altar 
within, and keep it burning there forever ! 



